Tag: tips

Things that can make macOS better

I use macOS as the main OS in my computer, actually the only one in my personal computer, but I have other computers with Linux as desktop too, but macOS is the one that I use the most. And over the time I have learned how to get more from the OS as the default installation.

For example, I currently don’t use Spotlight, I use another tool called “Alfred” you all might know it.

Alfred > Spotlight

Spotlight was a good thing back in the days were it was basically a search tool for the OS living in the corner, where nobody looks. But it was not good as a some sort of launcher, and having all my apps in the Dock was not a good idea. Then Alfred arrived and it came with other functionality like workflows and search in places where spotlight just don’t do, also the fuzzy word search (like GC and expect to get Google Chrome) works very well. read more

How to move some files but preserve the directory tree?

So, I have a bunch of ogg files that I moved to mp3 (I don’t want to start a format/encoder war, I just did it), I wanted to move the old ogg files, I didn’t delete them because probably I need them in the future. To move the files apart the easiest way could be using find and xargs:


find . -iname "*ogg" -print0 |xargs -0 -I {} mv {} /dest/folder/

The problem with this is that all those ogg files would be in /dest/folder/ all together, and I want to have them each in the corresponding subfolder, I was looking and found that some uses “cp –parents” unfortunately it seems that the cp in OS X does not include that.

What I ended up doing.

If you create a package file (.tar for example), the directories are preserved, so, for me the trick was using tar for that purpose.


find . -name "*ogg" -print0 | xargs -0 tar cvf - |(cd /dest/folder/ ; tar xfp -)

You’ll see all those ogg files in the screen as they are “copied” to the destination folder. later you can remove the files with find again.


find . -iname "*ogg" -delete

 

I assume there is a way to remove the files as soon as they have been added to the tar file.

Find (and remove files) with find

find is a great tool to find things, but not only to find them, but to work on them. I have a small collection of music, which I presume at some point will be removed from my computer hard drive (maybe if I can get a new one it won’t be there at all) because I mostly listen to music from internet and I have a copy of the music in a external hard drive.

Today I imported the folder where the music is to iTunes again, and it created playlists that I don’t remember to have them before. That is because there were several m3u files there (winamp playlists), there are around 5k files in that directory tree and I don’t want to spend my time looking for m3u files, so, let the computer do the job.

With find is easy to find files, not by their name but by their type the f is for file.

find . -type f

Ok, but that will include all the “mp3” which are files, so if I make use of -iname to find by name,  how can I do the opposite?, well, like in most programming languages, you can negate by using the exclamation symbol !.

find . -type f ! -iname "*mp3"

And add some more extensions.

find . -type f ! -iname "*mp3" ! -iname "*ogg" ! -iname "*m4a" ! -iname "*wma"

That will give me all files that are not mp3, ogg, m4a or wma. Then just use the -delete parameter to as find to delete them.

find . -type f ! -iname "*mp3" ! -iname "*ogg" ! -iname "*m4a" ! -iname "*wma" -delete

And… they are gone.

How would you do it?. Share it in the comments.

Vim Pro tip – Edit the current buffer in a new tab

Quite often I found in vim that I would like the current buffer in a new tab, I use a lot the vertical and horizontal splits in vim, then I reach the limit (my screen limit) for the vertical/horizontal splits, this means: if I add a new vertical split the code looks ugly even if it respects the 80 columns width, or if add a new horizontal split there would be just too few lines that is not worth to keep the buffer.

Then I used open a new tab, type

:e

then type the path to the buffer I like to edit. Until now, now I open a new tab, then type

:ls

check then number of the buffer I want in this new tab and then type

:bX

being “X” the number of the buffer, ej “:b2“. Another trick is to type

:bn

for the next buffer or

:bp

for the previous.